*Gee whiz.
Strelka, maybe even more posthuman than the Russian Cosmists, and that's saying something
(...)
“A Copernican shift in the philosophy of design is needed, one that begins with sometimes unsettling implications of 21st century circumstances and technologies, one that may shift the balance in different ways from experiences to outcomes, from users to systems, from aesthetics to access, from intuition to abstraction, from experience to ideals.”
While continuing to map The New Normal reality, the last year of the program offers to explore three new areas of research.
ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE
Politics and technology are interwoven as means to remake the world by design: not only does technology express a political arrangement, but any polity emerges only within a technical milieu. Through different genres of computation such as smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, and the Internet of Things, automation can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole. The research theme will look at ways that algorithmic governance shift our perspectives on political geography, sovereignty, citizenship, and regimes of rights, and how leverage is embedded in computational technologies.
INVERSE UNCANNY VALLEYS
The uncanny valley refers to the feeling of unease that people feel when confronted with something human-like but not quite human enough. When talking about the “Inverse Uncanny Valley,” we refer to seeing yourself from an outside robot perspective. This research theme looks at uncanny valleys on the individual, group, urban, and geopolitical scales. The obvious examples of humanoid robotics, deep fakes, camouflage, chatbots, machine vision, and so on are of central concern, but so are bigger stakes of post-anthropocenic design.
HUMAN EXCLUSION ZONES
This theme will explore the programmatic separation of the human and the non-human. Automation at the urban scale may mean opening the factory doors and generalizing its environmental motifs more widely. Bringing automated factory logics into the city means learning to live with or in Human Exclusion Zones (HEZ). The extreme of the human exclusion zone may set half the Earth’s surface aside for recovery, rewilding, remediation, repair, and return to other evolutionary selection pressures.
These themes are central to this year’s cycle of the experimental postgraduate program, which will run for five months with a group of 30 Russian and international researchers joining the design think-tank in Moscow....
